DARPA Robotics Challenge Ups Ante

PORTLAND, Ore. — In the time-honored tradition of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA is upping the difficulty of its $2 million purse Robotics Challenge, extending the finals for six months (to June 15 through June 16, 2015 in the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif.) in order to give the 24 teams time to adapt to the new tougher rules.

"The trials were much more successful than we had expected," said Gill Pratt, DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) program director in a conference call. Consequently, DARPA plans to significantly "raise the bar" by increasing the difficulty of the tasks and further degrading the harshness of the environment.

Six teams are using the Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics, which was loaned to them by DARPA.

First of all, no tethers will be allowed for power or communications, forcing the teams to build batteries or other fuel sources into their 300 pound robots. Secondly, the use of so-called "fall arrestors" will not be allowed. Robots will have to be rugged enough to withstand a fall without damage, plus will have to be able to get up again on their own. No human assistance will be allowed to help a fallen robot or one that gets stuck on a hazard. Time will become a more significant factor as well -- all tasks will have to be completed in one hour, rather than four hours, as was the case in the December 2013 trial runs. And lastly, the wireless communications channels will be intermittent and randomly degraded in bandwidth.

As a consequence, the final robot trial has been pushed back six months, with each funded team receiving $1.5 million instead of $1 million, to give them time to build-in power sources, wireless communications channels, write algorithms for getting up after a fall and convert from step-by-step remote control -- which depends on a reliable communications channel -- to short commands that depend on prewritten algorithms to execute. For instance, climbing stairs with damage will have to be drawn from a new library of autonomous functions where the robot avoids debris on the stairs using algorithms, rather than depend on the human operator to tell it exactly where to set down their feet.

The Defense Advanced Project Agency (DARPA) Robotics
Challenge will allow only a single operator to send high-level
commands to the robot, but will degrade the wireless connection with
latency and intermittence. However, the operator will be able to
enlist helpers to "crowd source" helpful information from the
Internet. (Source: DARPA)

Other new functions are designed to make tasks easier to perform by allowing autonomy algorithms to be stored on the Internet and retrieved as needed by any number of people helping out the actual robot operator. Only one person can actually send commands to the robot, but he will have full access to the Internet and any number of helpers.

"There as been a new concept in robotic autonomy added, which has been known as crowd robotics, which is the idea that the robot is able to access remote information and remote computational resources, we believe the commercial world is going to develop this capability, but we are not going to replicate the work the commercial world is going to develop, but rather the opposite," said Pratt. "We are doing the work which we think the commercial sector is not going to do -- in particular problems that are unique to disaster response -- such as operating without the possibility of human intervention in case something goes wrong."

Yes, raising the bar will definitely lead to new innovations. In fact, I would not say:It would be fascinating, but that: It will be fascinating to see what technology developments come out of this competition.

This competition is grueling and it is great to see DARPA continuing to raise the bar. It would be fascinating to see what technology developments come out of thsi competition that actually get commercialized.

Yes, you are right about DARPA ofter failing--usually because they set their expectations to high. So it is refreshing that they set them high, but not high enough. There is worldwide interest in deveoping smart robots--one reason--and of course a $2 million purse doesn't hurt :)

@DrQuine, there is an implicit assumption in your prediction - that it will be a robot instead of many. That is really where the complexity lies. Break out the tasks and imagine a robot for each and the problem becomes much simpler. This is similar to the advent of electric motors. The predictions at the time were that the complexity of bringing all the work to a motor would be overwhelming. The solution: Build a whole bunch of motors.

@KB3001 Good point. Personal care of the elderly is a growing need. It will be interesting to see how the humanoid robot gets "qualified" (certified) as a registered nurse, LPN, or aide. Once done, they will have the advantage that a given model of robot may be precertified without the need for individual attendence in years of nursing school as humans are required to do. I'd predict a very long development cycle before they're able to do much more than deliver meals. They'll certainly need solid programming to ensure fail-safe operations and appropriate responses to unexpected problems.

Not sure about your "robots" prediction, DrQuine. The Japanese are already introducing humanoids to help the aged. Most advanced countries will follow suit because they will face the same problems soon.

I'm pleased that DARPA is making such good progress that the bar can be raised. All too often, projects fail to meet their objectiive and the expectations must be lowered. Congratulations to DARPA and the hard working engineering teams.

I predict that we will not see many robots in daily living in the future. They will be concentrated in the military, heavy manufracturing, and emergency rescue applications. Instead I expect that the Internet will become even more ubiquitious (as if it isn't already wiith SmartPhones). smart devices (like autonomous cars) will require less human intervention, and we'll all be struggling when failed devices (intermittent problems can't get fixed) make it hard to do things that used to be simple.